Speidel, a 105-year-old seller of watchbands and an icon of Rhode Island’s jewelry industry, filed for bankruptcy late Friday.

Attorney Allan M. Shine is now running the company as its temporary receiver. A permanent receiver will be appointed July 16 by Judge Michael A. Silverstein in Superior Court, Providence.

Speidel, headquartered in Cranston, has had several owners over the past century, including Textron, the Providence-based conglomerate that bought the company in 1964.

Its most recent owner was Frederick N. Levinger, a jewelry industry heavyweight who came out of retirement to acquire Speidel just two years ago.

This time, however, Levinger’s timing was not ideal. Rhode Island’s economy began to slip in January 2007, and the nation tumbled into recession in December of that year. The downturn has prompted a steep drop in consumer spending amid fears of rising unemployment.

“There has not been the order flow. It’s the nature of the beast right now,” Levinger’s attorney, Stephen J. Carlotti, said Friday. “Fred Levinger has done everything reasonably possible to try to survive. He was unable to do so.”

In January, The Colibri Group, a major Rhode Island jewelry maker where Levinger worked for three decades before his brief retirement, closed.

Levinger, 72, was not available for comment on Friday.

Shine, the receiver, could not be reached. It is not clear if he will keep the business running during the receivership.

In purchasing Speidel, Levinger also acquired the Providence Watch Hospital, a watch repair and sales business with retail shops in Cranston, in the Garden City shopping center, and in South Kingstown, on Old Tower Hill Road.

The Providence Watch Hospital opened in 1940. Its seven watchmakers and five technicians service 55,000 timepieces annually.

In all, the two privately held businesses had 47 employees. They learned of the bankruptcy on Friday, at the start of the annual vacation for workers at the watchband distribution plant.

The Speidel that collapsed Friday was a fraction of its former size.

Founded in 1904 on Ship Street in Providence, Speidel was owned by Levinger’s father, Paul, in the late 1950s and the 1960s. It was in that era that the company introduced the Twist-O-Flex, a metal expansion watchband that helped spring it to national renown.

By the late 1970s, sales were approaching $100 million. But the company’s Rhode Island footprint began to shrink after it was bought by Austrian watchband-maker Hermann Hirsch Armbander Ges. m.b.H. in 1997.

Hirsch shuttered Speidel’s downtown Providence headquarters and ended a manufacturing operation that had employed 200 workers.

Still, when a local Speidel executive, Jeffrey Massotti, bought the company in 2002, it had nearly 150 employees in Rhode Island.

By the time Levinger succeeded Massotti, Speidel was mainly a watchband distributor, importing products from China and selling them in the United States to 2,500 manufacturers, jewelers and big-box stores such as Wal-Mart. Industry watchers, however, said it could rediscover its mojo under Levinger’s guidance.

Given Levinger’s “demonstrated success in taking fine names in the jewelry industry,” Frank Dallahan, president of the Manufacturing Jewelers & Suppliers of America, said at the time, “I’m sure he’ll work the same kind of magic he has been able to with other brands.”

Levinger too, had high hopes. “The brand name is an old name, but it needs promotion,” he said after announcing the purchase. “I like niche businesses, especially when they’re niche businesses with a brand name.”

Only two years later, Levinger acknowledged in a court filing that Speidel had become “insolvent and unable to meet its obligations.”

“There are a lot of factors,” Carlotti, Levinger’s attorney, said. “It no longer made any sense to continue the operation.”

bgedan@projo.com